The World of Suzie Wong began life as a novel by British author Richard Mason. The book, published first in England and then in the United States, proved very popular. It led to a stage adaptation by Paul Osborn, which opened on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater on October 14, 1958, and ran for over a year. Because of the success of both novel and play, Paramount brought The World of Suzie Wong to the screen in 1960, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan. The film version was beautifully directed by Richard Quine, its story set against stunningly photographed locations (Geoffrey Unsworth was the cameraman) and played out against the gorgeous musical score of George Duning.

Duning and director Richard Quine had already worked together several times – beginning with Quine’s first film, The Sunny Side of the Street, and continuing with My Sister Eileen, Full of Life, Operation Mad Ball, Bell, Book and Candle, It Happened to Jane and Strangers When We Meet. Duning had an innate musical sense of what made Quine’s films tick, and their collaboration together produced some unique and wonderful film scores, of which Suzie Wong is a classic example. It is filled with Duning’s incredible gift for melody, starting with his stunning main theme and working its way through some of the best dramatic scoring Duning ever did, right up there with Picnic. James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn also wrote a song for the film called “Suzie Wong (The Cloud Song),” and Duning uses that as a secondary theme throughout the score. There is some source music, mostly heard coming from the bar in the Namkok Hotel – a lot of those cues are Duning originals, but he sprinkles in some classic standards, too. The score has a lot of variety and perfectly blends the picturesque visuals with the human drama, capturing every emotion and every scene perfectly. In a career filled with classic scores, Suzie Wong is one of Duning’s finest achievements.

The World of Suzie Wong had a soundtrack release on RCA Records back in 1960. Side A of the album basically had the main title and then a lot of the Duning source music, while Side B had some of the score cues – the album ran around thirty-five minutes. For this release, we have Duning’s entire score, which we’ve put in film order because it plays so beautifully that way. We’ve kept all the Duning source music cues in the film sequence because they’re really part of the fabric of his score. In the bonus section, we’ve put the source music cues that aren’t by Duning, along with the LP version of the main title and a few other alternates and odds and ends, all totaling seventy-eight minutes of film music heaven. For the transfers, we went from the original three-track album masters as well as the original scoring masters, all in glorious stereo sound. - KRITZERLAND